Grafton, £4.99, ISBN 978-0712355759
Horror, 1990 (Reissue)
William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land is… well, it’s classified as horror, but let’s be honest: it’s more like being trapped in the stream-of-consciousness musings of a 17th-century man who just mainlined laudanum and then tried to describe a dream he had about the end of the world. And I guess that makes it horror, but more in the “Did I just have a stroke?” sense than the “Oh no, monsters!” sense.
Ostensibly, this is a “dying Earth” novel—one of the earliest of its kind, in fact! The Sun has burned out, the world is plunged into eternal night, and humanity’s last survivors live inside a gigantic, pyramidal structure called the Last Redoubt.
This is not a cool sci-fi pyramid, though. No, this is a pyramid built around an ancient power source that’s barely holding it together, much like my patience while reading this book. And outside? The darkness is filled with Things. We don’t know exactly what these Things are, but they watch and wait in a way that is presumably menacing but mostly just confusing.
Our narrator (who, as far as I can tell, has no name) starts out in the 17th century, regaling us with the tale of his whirlwind romance with Mirdath the Beautiful, who unfortunately was not Mirdath the Long-Lived. She dies in childbirth, and rather than doing normal 17th-century mourning things (like dueling someone or catching consumption), he instead has an out-of-body experience that sends him way into the future. Maybe. It’s never quite clear if he actually jumps forward in time or if this is some cosmic dream state, but we’re in the Night Land now, and he’s on a quest to find Mirdath’s reincarnation—because his obsessive love also transcends time and space, apparently.
What follows is an extremely long, meandering journey across an endless void of horror and existential dread, both for the narrator and for the reader, who must navigate Mr Hodgson’s utterly bizarre, archaic prose. Imagine someone trying to write Shakespearean English while suffering from a head injury, and you’re getting close.
You may have heard that The Night Land received high praises from authors like HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Sure, the book is full of incredible, eerie ideas! But if you were hoping for tight plotting and gripping narrative structure—congratulations, you played yourself. Here, the normally reliable William Hope Hodgson acts like what we’d politely call an ideas guy, meaning he throws down a bunch of fascinating concepts and then proceeds to absolutely fumble them at every turn.
He sets up a framing device with the 17th-century narrator. Then promptly forgets about it. Did the original guy just vanish? Was this a literal time jump? Who knows? Certainly not Mr Hodgson, because he never tells us.
The sentence structure is a labyrinth designed to confuse and bewilder. At times, it feels like he’s actively challenging you to decipher his thoughts as though The Night Land were less of a novel and more of an ancient cryptic text.
The pacing is painfully slow. Imagine if The Lord of the Rings was just Frodo walking to Mordor while constantly monologuing about his feelings, and also Sauron was a vague, possibly metaphorical presence that never really does anything. That’s The Night Land.
Look, The Night Land is undeniably important in the history of horror and science fiction. It’s weird, it’s ambitious, and its influence can still be seen in modern dying Earth fiction. But reading it, that’s another story. You’ll come away with a deep appreciation for its ideas but also the strong suspicion that Mr Hodgson wasn’t writing this for you—he was writing it for himself, and an editor was either too polite or too exhausted to intervene.
So yes, it deserves its place in the horror canon. But would I recommend reading it? Only if you’re prepared to stare into the abyss and spend several hundred pages wondering if the abyss is just the personal diary of William Hope Hodgson.
